A Guy's Guide to Great EatingBig-Flavored Fat-Reduced Recipes for Men Who Love to Eat

By Don Mauer

Don Mauer is your average guy. He roots for the Tarheels, has an occasional cigar, and loves food, a lot. When trying to get his weight under control, he found that most low-fat cookbooks didn't satisfy his meat-and-potato tastebuds and that the skimpy servings made him want to run to the nearest steakhouse.

But unlike your ordinary Joe, Don, an avid cook and best-selling author, decided to do something about this dilemma. He overhauled his favorite recipes, blasting away the fat and goosing up the flavor. A Guy's Guide to Great Eating: Big Flavored, Fat-Reduced Recipes for Men Who Love to Eat by Don Mauer is the result, jam-packed with more than 175 easy-to-make recipes.

Don Mauer' s dedication to great-tasting food is an obsession. He tested and retested every possible way to reduce fat without compromising the no-holds-barred flavors he craves. His Crunchy Country-Style Oven-Fried Chicken, North Carolina Pulled Turkey Barbecue, Smokin' Chili Pepper Cheeseburgers, Snappy O'Brien Breakfast Potatoes, Southwestern Corn and Shrimp Chowder, Nawlins-Style Red Beans and Rice, Steakhouse Spinach, Half-the-Fat Chocolate Chip Cookies and Double Chocolate Chip Fudge Brownies all taste as good as they sound. And the guy-sized portions in this mouthwatering collection get 25 percent or less of their calories from fat. Each recipe comes with a full nutritional analysis, including the amount of saturated fat.

The inspiration for A Guy's Guide to Great Eating came from the heartfelt response Don Mauer received from readers of his spectacularly successful first book, Lean & Lovin' It. Women confided that they never found low-fat meals to satisfy their husbands, until they tried one of Mauer' s recipes. Men came up to him at book signings, raving about his "real food."

Anyone who's ever struggled to get into a pair of too-tight jeans and dreaded cutting back will identify with Don. "I'm 51 years old and in excellent health," he writes. "Am I slim? Nope. I haven't been slim since I was nine years old. Am I lean? I'm far leaner than I was in 1989, when I weighed over 300 pounds. Am I as lean as I could be? No. But, I've maintained most of my 100-pound weight loss for almost a decade."

A Guy's Guide to Great Eating is low-fat cooking for regular guys and the folks who cook for them and are trying to keep them healthy. The recipes are convenient, and all the ingredients can be found in your local grocery store. Take it from a food lover like Don, you can enjoy crab cakes loaded with crab, succulent sizzling shrimp, spicy oven-fried onion rings, a chicken pot pie better than Mom used to make and a dark chocolate cake with fudgy chocolate frosting, all the while reducing your fat intake. Perhaps lowfat isn't such a bad thing after all.

Don Mauer is a newpaper columnist and popular speaker at corporate wellness programs and weight-control groups and is the author of Lean & Lovin' It. He lives with his wife in Raleigh, North Carolina.

A Guy's Guide to Great Eating
Big-flavored, Fat-Reduced Recipes for Men Who Love to Eat
By Don Mauer
Houghton Mifflin Company
Paperback, $17.00
350 pages, June 1999
ISBN: 0-395-91536-8
Information provided by the publisher.